Dart Transit owner-operator John Gill and his wife, Catherine, went to the Bahamas for the award announcement.

“Stick with me and you’re going places,” owner-operator John Gill told his wife, Catherine, during their courtship. When the couple learned they were headed to Paradise Island in the Bahamas after John was named a finalist for the Truckload Carriers Association’s annual Owner-Operator of the Year contest, “I said, ‘See, I told you,’” Gill says.

“I was excited just to come here,” Catherine says. But when her husband’s name was called as the winner of the top prize, “that was the icing on the cake,” she says. Gill was honored March 3 at the Atlantis Resort as TCA’s 2007 Owner-Operator of the Year for his driving record, exemplary work history and involvement in the community and industry. The contest is sponsored by Navistar Inc. and Overdrive.

Driving a truck “was my childhood dream,” Gill says, but one he set aside when he joined the U.S. Navy right out of high school, spending four years repairing nuclear submarines at the Polaris and Poseidon base at Holy Loch, Scotland. He met and married Catherine in Scotland, then moved back to his home town of Patriot, Ohio, and took a job at a shop that repaired mining and agricultural trucks and equipment. “They’d let me take one of the coal trucks and practice driving,” he recalls. When a driver quit, “my boss said, ‘There’s the truck,’ and I went from busting tires and changing oil right into driving.”

That career move has served Gill well. An Overdrive Trucker of the Month in 2004, Gill has been an owner-operator for 26 years, all with Dart Transit Co., based in Eagan, Minn. He has logged more than 3 million accident-free miles, earning him the National Safety Council’s prestigious Three Million Mile Safety Award. He has won every safety award Dart offers and is a past recipient of Dart’s Contractor of the Year award.

When not on the road, Gill volunteers as a Trucker Buddy for a second-grade class at Southwestern Elementary School in Patriot. He also works with the Boy Scouts of America, the Gallia County Council on Aging, the 4H and the American Red Cross.